A New Design Book for LibreOffice

Once upon a time, new software shipped with massive manuals the size of
telephone directories. Shelves in computer stores used to sag under
the weight of the hefty boxes, and digital manuals were no smaller.
For those of us old enough to remember those days, getting to grips with
new software without the paper brick can be hard.
Of course, the scarcity of manuals has been a good thing for book
publishers. And it's allowed development teams to focus on what they
do best: writing and testing code.

But buying huge libraries of expensive tech books is beyond the reach
of many FOSS users. Economics is one of the factors that attracts users
to the FOSS world, especially in developing countries.

Teaching yourself to use an app through experimentation is possible, but
it can be time-consuming. Scouring Google and YouTube for tutorials can
be frustrating, especially when the tutorials are outdated or incomplete.
In fact, a little time spent on community forums shows it's a common
problem for users of all ages. Most users tend to gravitate toward the
most visible icons and learn to use a small percentage of the available
features.

Even when you are blessed with an official manual, those weighty tomes
rarely make for light or enjoyable reading. They're better suited to
use as a reference work rather than as a practical guide.

What new users (also experienced ones) need is a practical course in
a book—a book that teaches you how to get things done using the
application, rather than a painful dissection of every feature and
menu option.

Designing with LibreOffice is a new book from Bruce
Byfield (who also happens to be a longtime LJ contributor). Its premise is simple. It will teach you what you need to
know to use LibreOffice as an expressive tool to make your documents
and presentations appealing and rich.

As such, it promises to be much more than a dry list of menus and
features. Instead, it covers the basic principles of design and
demonstrates how to express them through LibreOffice.

It's also applicable to OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Apache OpenOffice
and other OpenOffice derivatives. And like the software, it's free.
The book has been released under the appropriately liberal Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. This means you can share it,
modify it and even sell it. It's available in PDF format and in ODT.
You also can order a physical version of the
book from Lulu.com.

The book's emphasis on style and design means that users will gain a
deeper understanding of how to create beautiful documents, diagrams,
spreadsheets and presentations. Bruce covers the features that make
LibreOffice the most powerful suite for rapidly styling these files.

Furthermore, he makes a convincing argument for the "LibreOffice way".
Readers will learn why you shouldn't approach LibreOffice with the same
attitude as Microsoft's Office apps.

LibreOffice is a great suite of tools, and Designing with
LibreOffice
is a great hands-on guide to using it professionally. You can download
the PDF from here.